FRANCES BARTH NEW PAINTINGS: 2011-2017 features new works by Frances Barth made between 2011 and 2017 and never seen before. This will be the artist first Solo exhibition with the gallery.
“Frances Barth's … puts the techniques of Color Field abstraction to the service of landscape. It is not the coherent, semi-abstracted landscape of Milton Avery, who influenced the movement and whose soft shapes and colors are sometimes visible here, nor the gestural extravagances of Helen Frankenthaler. It is, rather, a more fractured, multi-layered terrain similar to that in the work of 80's artists like David Salle and Julian Schnabel. It combines suggestive abstract motifs with a relatively precise landscape vocabulary derived from maps, charts and topographical diagrams, and flavors it all with intimations of Japanese art. …(Barth’s) paintings are quiet, often poetic compendiums of the ways in which earth, water and atmosphere can be evoked and signalled”.
- ROBERTA SMITH (The New York Times, Art in Review, June 10, 1994).

Frances Barth was born in the Bronx, New York, and studied painting and art history at Hunter College, CUNY. She has exhibited her paintings widely in both solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960’s, and her work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, in NYC, The Dallas Museum of Art, TX, The Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo. Frances showed paintings in the 2015 Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Grimani in “Frontiers Re-imagined.”
Early in her career, Frances also performed with Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas in New York City in live performance and video/film. Her awards include National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1974 and 1982, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 1995, two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase awards in ’99 and ’04, the Anonymous Was a Woman grant in 2006, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017.

Art in General and Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia (CCAE) present an exhibition and performances by artists Merike Estna and Maria Metsalu, curated by CCAE Director Maria Arusoo. The performances are part of PERFORMA 17 and kick off Art in General’s International Collaboration exhibition, Soft Scrub, Hard Body, Liquid Presence.

Soft Scrub, Hard Body, Liquid Presence observes a shift taking place in the realm of our aesthetic and emotional sensibilities. The exhibition wonders if our over-consumption of virtual space and submission to the stress of competition and acceleration has provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, exploring the zombified body as a response to today’s evolving societal structures.

Today, individuals suffer under the duress of a continuously fractured and precarious landscape and—even more acutely—an understanding of the self. Looking particularly to the female perspective, the exhibition attempts to address this uncanny, post-accelerationist body in its new surroundings, questioning our state of turmoil, loneliness, and uncertainty surrounding the future.

Merike Estna’s works echo contemporary social concerns with allusions to the digital, the nostalgic, and a romantic reverence for the parts of human existence that are currently mutating, melting, and slipping away. Her performative paintings and multidimensional works—including textiles, rugs, and clothing—question the diminished value of traditional female labor. Estna’s performance Red Herring engages painting as a stage for human interaction.

Maria Metsalu’s sculpture and video deal with the politicization of sexuality and the millennial body. She confronts our current conditions by taking her own body as the epicenter of her work, turning it into a shimmer as sublimely dull as that on a screen. Her performance Mademoiselle X blurs relationships between self and structure in a time of technological advancement and sociopolitical uncertainty.

The artist-founded, Tallinn-based publisher Lugemik also presents a mini-bookshop within the exhibition, open during gallery hours. Lugemik provides a specially-curated selection of books for browsing and for sale that contextualize the exhibition’s themes and provide a glimpse into the contemporary art scene in Estonia.

Black Ball Projects is pleased to present 12 x 12, 2017. This is the gallery’s 3rd iteration of the initial 12 x 12 show, staged in December of 2015. The gallery is physically gridded into squares to house works from an eclectic group of artists. Each year that Black Ball Projects holds this large group show we increase the grid size by 5 inches. This year the grid dimensions are 25” x 25” and works are shown within a single grid square, they may be smaller, but not larger.

Following a chance encounter on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction show, Àiné O’Dwyer and Mohammed Issa “Matona” made their live collaborative debut at the 2016 Counterflows festival in Glasgow. Now performing together for the second time, they bring their union of Tanzanian and Irish music to Greenpoint’s San Damiano Mission.

Mohammed Issa “Matona” is a multi-instrumentalist and teacher renowned for his performance ability and commitment to the preservation of Taarab, the traditional music of the East African island of Zanzibar, Tanzania. A unique style of Arab-African music played with the instruments of Middle Eastern countries, Taarab arrived in Zanzibar from Egypt in 1870 and has since evolved into a niche popular music form currently taught and played at the Dhow Countries Music Academy (DCMA) in Zanzibar, where Matona teaches and serves as Artistic Director. Matona has been thoroughly appreciated at the DCMA for the dedication and innovation he has brought to educating young and often disadvantaged people as well as for his integration of a diverse range of musical forms into the curriculum. He is best known for his extraordinary virtuosity in playing oud, violin, nay, tash kota, saxophone, percussion, keyboard, ganun, guitar, cello, and clarinet.

Áine O’Dwyer‘s practice lies somewhere between her role as a vocalist, musician, accompanist, improviser, composer, performer, listener, sonic Stalker, and audience member. In recent years, the pipe organ has become an integral site for her experimentation, culminating in the albums Locusts and Gegenschein. This year’s Gallarais experiments with acoustic decay and was developed during her self-made residency at the Brunel tunnel shaft in London. All three releases celebrate her interests in found and forgotten spaces, chance choreographies, acoustic phenomena, the act of listening, and the search for alternative scorings through a combined performativity of instruments, drawings, space, time, memory, and the body. Past solo releases include Anything Bright or Startling? and Music for Church Cleaners.

San Damiano Mission is not wheelchair accessible. There are three steps leading up to the building and we are happy to accommodate anyone who needs assistance. It is located blocks away from the Nassau G subway stop. Please write chloe@blankforms.org at least three days before the event and we will make every effort to accommodate you.

The file cabinet. Perhaps you have seen one on the streets awaiting removal, or maybe you yourself still own one stuffed with extinct hard drives and various SCSI cables? We are not long from the days when these flame-resistant metal drawers held vital information for and against us; just one of many cold-war-era technologies built to accommodate persistent atomic threat or perpetual bureaucracy.

Leslie Brack’s Memorandum returns us to these locked, blank facades, with their expressions of institutional control, information, and order. Their cold metal drawers, nonetheless, retain a reassuring materiality considering today’s more nefarious digital dossiers that extend invisibly into the unknowable infinities of corporation and state. Brack renders the steely surfaces of these monoliths with exacting realism on paper in watercolor, whose surprising lightness is luminous and eerie. These dented, scratched, and rusted portraits exhibit anthropomorphic qualities which remind us that, despite their historical nature, we are still confronted by their bureaucratic human progeny.

Leslie Brack is a painter living in Ithaca, NY. She holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a Lecturer at Cornell University. “Memorandum” was most recently exhibited at Ithaca College (2017). Previous one-person exhibitions include the Herbert F Johnson Museum (2015), and Cathouse FUNeral (2015). She wishes to thank the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Hambidge Center for the Arts for their support of the work in this exhibition.

Memorandum constitutes the third exhibition in Cathouse Proper’s solo-solo series at 524 Projects. “Solo-solo shows” are one-person exhibitions that feature a major single statement by a contemporary artist of significance.

Century Pictures is pleased to present Brooklyn Bust, a group exhibition featuring works by Joe Bradley, Nicole Eisenman, KAWS, and Denise Kupferschmidt. The works on view are all unexpected takes on traditional representation of the upper human figure. The ubiquity of the bust throughout art history has lent itself to a multitude of formal and stylistic depictions of gods, prominent contemporary figures, political and military leaders, and on. The telling of a culture was often through the bust. Revealing ideals, aesthetic and moral principles, a bust conveyed the story of what a culture strived for, and also what technologies were available, what materials were vetted, what artists and artisans at the highest level could create to incite reverie.

While working in Brooklyn, Joe Bradley, Nicole Eisenman, KAWS, and Denise Kupferschmidt were perceptibly influenced by a decided irreverence to rigid parameters of definition. Self-effacing humor, caustic wit, or a damning social critique is calibrated into these works. The word BUST itself takes on a myriad of interpretations in the vernacular of slang. Brooklyn Bust cheekily invokes the linguistic slippages that change according to the input/mutual interpretation of the viewer. The works here are liminal.

Joe Bradley’s monochromatic painting offers the most minimal cues to suggest an anthropomorphic rendering. An “intentional shoddiness,” emblematic of Bradley’s works from this series, communicates a general disappointment with the narrative of twentieth-century painting. Stretchers are store bought, and surfaces are less than pristine. The artist has described these works as expressively “pathetic” which is at odds with the heroic scale of the totemic visage. Rather than reducing subject to assert the painting’s objecthood, Bradley proposes a “bust” whose subject derives from the lexicon and semiotics of painting itself.

Bridging graffiti, pop art, and consumer culture, KAWS’ works convey an underlying wit, while confirming his agility as an artist. He has primarily looked to and appropriated pop-culture animations to form an artistic vocabulary for his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. KAWS’ cast of hybrid cartoon/human characters have generalized archetype names – Chum, Companion, Accomplice – to express the gamut of the human condition.

Denise Kupferschmidt’s Keyhole Head echoes the shape of a keyhole, communicating a secretive space that lingers along the edges of figuration and abstraction, voyeurism and objectivity. Meanwhile Kupferschmidt’s Shoes (Pink) incite the language of advertising in a highly graphic style and a purposeful nod to Henri Matisse, touching on the everyday, from blatant consumerism, to fine art and back again.

Nicole Eisenman’s Sleeping Frat Guy presents a rough-hewn plaster bust that rests upon a pedestal, which acts as both framing device and support. Eisenman unveils the precariousness of masculinity by presenting vulnerability through the gestures of sleep. The figure, bulbous in form, upends its historical predecessors, refuting its archetype of power and exposing instead the fragility of normative gender constructs. The radical tenor of these sculptures, while whimsical, are steeped in political ramifications: the artist’s figurative fountain installation, featured this year in Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, which prominently displayed a transgender figure, was defiled and spray painted with a swastika just days before the most recent historic German vote. Eisenman’s creation of a space in contemporary art for LGBTQ bodies and experiences unhinges gender binaries, affirming a new vision.

Century Pictures is located at 1329 Willoughby Avenue in Bushwick, New York. The gallery is open Thursday–Sunday, 11am–6pm. For more information please visit our website at www.century-pictures.com. The gallery can be reached by phone at (212) 334–7866 or by email at info@century-pictures.com.

Arne Svenson’s Unspeaking Likeness is a photographic series of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures. These sculptures are commissioned by various law enforcement agencies and used for the purposes of establishing the identity of victims of suspected violent crime whose soft tissue facial features have been obliterated by either trauma or the passage of time. Svenson traveled throughout the USA and Mexico photographing these objects, treating them as live beings of whom he was taking a portrait. The point of focus was the eyes; the rest of the face was allowed to fall out of focus so as to better speak to the anonymity of the victim and the malleability of their existence.

First and foremost in Arne Svenson’s practice is to seek out the inner life, the essence, of his subjects, whether they be human, inanimate, or something in between. He uses his camera as a reporter uses text, to create a narrative that facilitates the understanding of that which may lie hidden or obscured. This narrative, at times only a whisper or suggestion, weaves throughout his divergent body of work.

Svenson’s photographs have been shown extensively in the United States and Europe and his work is included in numerous public and private collections. In 2016 he received the prestigious Nannen Prize for his project The Neighbors. He is a self-taught photographer with an educational and vocational background in special education. Svenson is the author/photographer of numerous books, including Unspeaking Likeness, The Neighbors, Prisoners and Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863). His most recent museum exhibition was The Neighbors at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2016.

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time hanging out in the fire stairs of my apartment building making different sounds with my voice and listening to them echo back to me. I imagined that behind the walls there was another planet that was a mirror image of this one. There were a few echo places around town where I knew I could go to talk to the other me.

Now that I live outside of the city, I notice other kinds of echoes, like how each tree in a forest is growing a forest worth of seeds. Or how the eggs that made us formed in our mothers while their bodies formed in our grandmothers. We all reverberate in so many ways.

I think we’re all born twins, dreaming each other into being. I’ve seen diagrams of astral projection where the sleeping person splits into two identical forms. Their dreaming body floats off like a vapor and travels around tethered to them by an energetic cord so it doesn’t get lost.

I’ve never seen a picture of what it looks like when the bodies merge again, but maybe when we’re awake, our other body sits inside us following all our movements and when our outer hands touch something in the world, our inner hands touch something in ourselves.

Fisher Parrish Gallery is pleased to present “Hardly Together”, an immersive exhibition by Field Experiments – a nomadic collective founded by Paul Marcus Fuog, Karim Charlebois Zariffa, and Benjamin Harrison Bryant. Fundamental to Field Experiments' process is the observation and documentation of a place; in response to these observations, Field Experiments composes objects in the form of conceptual souvenirs. Through collecting, assembling and repurposing, they seek to make work that comments on a time, a place and its people. Focusing their lens toward New York City, Field Experiments' “Hardly Together” exhibition is a study of the tenuous connections and surprising entanglements they've discovered during their research.

Field Experiments uses collaborative making to explore diverse cultures and craft communities in different regions around the world. Underpinned by cross-cultural exchange, they produce projects, products and ideas across multiple formats including furniture, clothing, video, publications, exhibitions, interiors, installation and printed materials.

In 2015, their work was nominated and featured in the Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum in London. Past work has been shown at Moiety Gallery in New York, Melbourne’s RMIT Design Hub, Ventura Lambrate in Milan, New York Design Week, Tokyo’s Gallery Festa and at Breda’s Graphic Design Festival and published in international design reference books by leading publishing houses including Phaidon and Gestalten.

Greenpoint Hill is pleased to present a two-person show featuring collaborative and solo work by Mikel Durlam and Monty J.

Both artists create dreamlike sculptural interpretations of the natural world. Their work defies categorization, synthesizing elements of design, visual poetry and surrealism. Durlam’s work presents a modern approach to representational sculpture. Monty J’s otherworldly living sculptures offer a more abstract take. Working together in a communal studio space in Brooklyn, Durlam and Monty J have created an ethereal collection of objects that connect the viewer to the terrestrial world while also fostering dreams of another one, far from home.

Mikel Durlam (b. Fort Dodge, IA) is a visual artist, musician and performer in Brooklyn, NY. Durlam has been an artist in residence at Pro Artibus (Finland), Wassaic Project (NY) and Vector (Romania). In addition to his solo work, since 2000 he has collaborated as the creative entity and performance/installation art duo The Fluff Construct. He has been a member of the art glam performance group Glitter Chariot and the doom psych band The Phantom Family Halo.

Monty J. Mattison (b. Detroit, MI) - known simply as Monty J - toils through the night perfecting his exquisite living sculptures. This past year Monty has exhibited work at The Future Perfect and Barneys New York. His work has been featured in T Magazine.

Greenpoint Hill is located at 100 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, New York 11222. Gallery hours are Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm and by appointment. Please contact the gallery at info@greenpointhill.com for more information.

ISSUE commemorates the close of the 2017 season with a special year-end event with acclaimed composer and electronic musician Tyondai Braxton and extended technique vocalist, composer, and performer Like A Villain (Holland Andrews), co-presented with BOMB Magazine. Entrance is $5 with two free drinks for ISSUE Members.

Tyondai Braxton performs a solo set incorporating electronic analog synthesis and new material drawing from his HIVE project and recent Oranged Out EP, with a visual component co-created by NY multimedia artist Grace Villamil. Released in 2015 on Nonesuch, HIVE1 is an album adaptation of a multimedia project he staged at the Guggenheim in 2013  an eight-movement suite of percussion and electronics that combines Braxton’s signature tension between progressive generative sound and orchestra-scaled synthesis.

Oranged Out is a collection of tracks from or near the time Braxton was working on HIVE1. The EP was released on Braxton’s bandcamp with 100% of the proceeds to support the work of Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, a nonprofit organization which advocates for gun control and against gun violence. Grace Villamil contributed the album artwork and video for the EP, with both created using video synthesizers & software inspired by nature and Japanese woodblock prints.

Under the moniker Like a Villain, Holland Andrews is known for her unrehearsed, long-form noise sets, which weave her voice and instrumental loops into massive cathedrals of sound. Andrews' approach  touching on haunting, ethereal beauty and deafening, cathartic discord  incorporates elements of notable minimalist composers such as Arvo Pärt, contemporary vocalists including Diamanda Galás, and modern experimental musicians like Björk, all heavily influenced by Broadway and opera music. For this performance, she performs excerpts from Ölümlü, a captivating yet-to-be-released new work described as “Broadway noise.”

Tyondai Braxton is an American composer and electronic musician. He has been writing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively, under various group titles, since the mid 1990’s. His music incorporates electronic and modern orchestral elements, ranging from solo pieces to large-scale symphonic works. The former front man of experimental rock band Battles, Braxton has since focused on his own work, including his critically acclaimed album Central Market – which has been performed by world-renowned orchestras such as London Sinfonietta, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He has been commissioned to write pieces for ensembles such as The Bang on a Can All Stars, Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, and Brooklyn Rider. In 2012, Braxton collaborated with legendary composer Philip Glass – performing as a duo for the festival series All Tomorrow’s Parties, as well as remixing Glass’ work for the REWORK remix album. In 2013, Braxton premiered HIVE - a multimedia piece that is part sound installation/part live performance - at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He has given subsequent HIVE performances at Sacrum Profanum Festival in Krakow, as part of the Nonesuch Records 50th Anniversary celebration at The Barbican in London, and at Sydney Opera House. HIVE1 - Braxton’s first new album in six years - was released on May 12, 2015 on Nonesuch Records. Braxton’s latest release, the Oranged Out EP, was released via Bandcamp as a pay-what-you-want download, with proceeds going to the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund. Braxton will be performing solo with visuals by Grace Villamil.

Holland Andrews is an American extended technique vocalist, composer, and performer based in and Portland, Oregon and France. Andrews, marked by an obsession with the diverse capabilities of the voice, is found composing vibrant sonic landscapes which are at times cinematic and dissonant. A multitude of dense vocal layers and textures are used to weave together a sprawling emotional tapestry to foster a space for both explosive self-examination and intimate learning. In addition to performing solo work under the stage name Like a Villain, Andrews has collaborated on projects of theater, dance, and film and has recently performed in spaces such as Baryshnikov Art Center, Princeton University, Montfort Théâtre, Palais de Tokyo Museum, La Friche de la Belle, Mai, India Teatro Di Roma, and more.

John Doe is pleased to present May We Share Our Minds?, a collaboration between Simona Prives, Shiuan Chang and Grace Noh, on view from December 2 - 17, 2017. The opening takes place on Saturday, December 2 with a live music performance as part of the exhibition at 6:30pm and 8:00pm.

Let’s suppose you enter a room where you see nothing but an endless loop of images and sounds rather in an uncanny way. Layers of images in motion project around you and the corresponding sounds fill the space as your eyes and ears begin to get adjusted to the place. What you see and hear may not be your own, but slowly they begin to trigger your own memories and connect your mind to this bizarre space.

This collaborative exhibition, May We Share Our Minds?, demands the presence of thoughts and instincts that rise from the viewer’s very own experience. The exhibition provides an environment where the viewer can fully immerse oneself surrounded by the overwhelming size of visual projection and sounds. The projected visual images are real places of our time in collage-like distorted, and somewhat controlled, forms accompanied by sounds that communicate with the images.

The artist, Simona Prives, observes the real, physical places of her surroundings and creates digital collages that go through the process of decomposition and reconstruction similar to how memories function. The images appear and disappear and get reconstructed in no logical order. The composer, Shiuan Chang, creates the musical piece in collaboration with Prives, using both musical instruments and daily objects of his surroundings. From two individuals sharing their minds, the images and sounds organically spread and trigger the viewer to stay connected to the space.

The exhibition project idea began with curator Grace Noh’s fascination in creating a space of distorted reality of thoughts and memories that every viewer can connect oneself to. What we see is from the world we are living in, and yet the outcome of what we are really seeing is a brand new world. Visual images from real life function almost as memories and documents in a distorted reality. We are part of this alien world where the images and sounds, both individually and as a whole, may or may not make sense.

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce the opening of Lack of Location Is My Location, an exhibition of works made by artists currently living, working, and teaching near the gallery, in Brooklyn.

The exhibition’s title borrows a line from a 1991 interview by critic Roberta Smith with artist Glenn Ligon. Referring to the disjuncture that Ligon witnessed and experienced during his daily school commute between two implicitly different worlds, the artist states: “lack of location is my location.” The words linger because they address a present condition.

Reconsidered in the context our current sociopolitical landscape, one might ask how this statement resonates with various forms of displacement, traversal, revision, and community building that are made manifest in artwork today?

For Becca Albee, Alexandra Bell, and William Villalongo cultural alienation begins with narrative. Identifying an apparatus becomes key to changing the conversation. Nicole Miller’s montage follows her peregrinations around the U.S. and in Europe to offer a necessarily partial portrait of a multiply situated subject.

Whether by piecing together memories, or by keeping company in the present, Eleana Antonaki and Aliza Nisenbaum claim space for personal histories of migration. Meanwhile, body, site, and sign conjoin in the depictive compositions of both Dawit L. Petros and Xaviera Simmons.

As Andrea Geyer and Kamrooz Aram look back to the institutional frameworks of the 20th-century to identify how cultural stories have been shaped, Lisa Corinne Davis and Torkwase Dyson complicate certain foundational tenets of Modernity and Modernism. Looking into the future, American Artist proposes an imaginary for new subjectivities as-yet-to-be-occupied.

Koenig & Clinton wishes to thank Glenn Ligon, Dr. Huey Copeland, all of the participating artists and their galleries for the many ways in which they have contributed.

For further information please contact info@koenigandclinton.com or call (212) 334– 9255. Hours of operation are Thursday–Sunday, 11AM–6PM and by appointment.
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KUSTERA PROJECTS is pleased to announce SLIVER, a site-specific exhibition of multidisciplinary new works by Irish artist Catherine Owens. The exhibition will run from November 18th through December 16th with an opening reception on Saturday, November 18th from 6-8pm.

The show brings together a series of triptych paintings on canvas, backed with LED lighting and immersed in a 360° audio soundscape. A set of exquisitely painted tall canvases illuminate the gallery space, suggesting transitions of time and experience through color, light and sound. As the light in the room changes, slivers of audio are heard, weaving together fragments of sound that document a migrant’s journey, the majestic song of the Dawn Chorus and elements of music by noted Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy .

SLIVER, in collaboration with Grammy award winning sound engineer Kevin Killen, 1212 Design Studio and Arup, will deliver moments of illumination that when experienced together form the push and the pull of the hope found in each new day.

Influenced by the light works of James Turrell and Dan Flavin, the minimalist color field paintings of Ellsworth Kelly as well as the performance works of Laurie Anderson, Catherine Owens’s exhibition is transitional, marking time and space through the transient nature of shifting colors and sound.

Owens has exhibited works at the Feldman Gallery, New York, Morris Healy Gallery, New York, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan, the Kerlin Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. She was Creative Director of visual content for the band U2 on five World Tours, and in collaboration with the band was the Director and a Producer of the seminal 3D film ‘U23D’ in 2008. As an award-winning artist at the forefront of digital technology, her work has allowed her to develop a sophisticated language, combining her studio practice with advancements in new technologies.

Daniel Klaas Beckwith theorizes a terminal point of human progress. In a posthuman chorus, motorized objects ominously harmonize amid a leering field of anthropomorphized debris. Vehicles and appliances appear to have developeda singular melodic voice, and discarded bags and refuse take ambiguously threatening shapes. Betraying the appearance of entropy, this is a depiction of a system who's efficiency is not only a tendency, but is approaching a limit.

Speedrunning is a niche genre of video gaming subculture in which a player attempts to beat or end a game as fast as possible, honing a cybernetic mastery of the coded system until it is understood at a more fundamental state; reaching beyond the visible screen of information and manipulating invisible truths. Logically centering around the eponymously titled article excerpt, speedrunning posits that ours is a world of fiction, built of useful misunderstanding and structural exploitation; refined by a language designed to dissect and control the chaos of nature.

The development of human language as a self-organizing structure churns an inevitable flow of efficiencies, and as survival is abstracted and exploited the ultimate product of progress reveals itself to be: entertainment. Distorting the diegetic frame by proving entertainment itself as a structure to exploit, the action of the speedrunner reveals the paradox of progress: as the length of the speedrun approaches zero, as when communication within any system approaches perfection, a moment of omniscient singularity appears in which distinctions no longer exist and only languageless static remains.